English is a crazy language........

I took a class this last week and the following is some of the literature we went over.

Enjoy: English is a crazy language. There is no egg in eggplant, ham in hamburger, neither apple nor pine in pineapple. English muffins weren’t invented in England nor French fries in France. Sweetmeats are candies while sweetbreads, which aren’t sweet, are meat.

We take English for granted. But if we explore its paradoxes, we find that quicksand can work slowly, boxing rings are square and a guinea pig is neither from Guinea nor is it a pig.

And why is it that writes write but fingers don’t fing, grocers don’t groce and hammers don’t ham?

If the plural of tooth is teeth, why isn’t the plural of booth beeth? One goose, 2 geese. So one moose, 2 meese? One index, 2 indices? Doesn’t it seem crazy that you can make amends but not one amend. If you have a bunch of odds and ends and get rid of all but one of them, what do you call it?

If teachers taught, why didn’t preachers praught? If a vegetarian eats vegetables, what does a humanitarian eat? Sometimes I think all the English speakers should be committed to an asylum for the verbally insane. In what language do people recite at a play and play at a recital? Ship by truck and send cargo by ship? Have noses that run and feet that smell? How can a slim chance and a fat chance be the same, while a wise man and a wise guy are opposites?

You have to marvel at the unique lunacy of a language in which your house can burn up as it burns down, in which you fill in a form by filling it out and in which you fill in a form by filling it out and in which, an alarm goes off by going on.

English was invented by people not computers, and it reflects the creativity of the human race, which, of course, is not a race at all. That is why, when the stars are out, they are visible, but when the lights are out, they are invisible.

Ya know, I started to witter on about the history of English, a Germanic language melded with Scandinavian and then overwritten by French, with borrows from all the cultures Britain decided needed to be "civilize." But where's the poetry in that? Life can be fuller if there are a few gaps left--yet another serendipitous paradox.

Don't forget all those silent letters! Do you really need to spell queue with 5 letters? Does pneumatic absolutely have to have a p upfront? Let's not forget Magdelene, pronounced maudlin and of course my favourite Featherstone-Waugh pronounced Fanshaw!

funin - whats it going to take to jolt that mind off of that one track?

connor - a few gaps?

cleverhands - silent letters will be my downfall.....lol

nick - thank you for the comment, english is probably the only language where one word, spelled the same way, can have so many different meanings.....where phrases are backwards....but what a language it is

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